Late last May, a fire raced through a dormitory for indigenous schoolgirls in Guyana’s southwestern interior, killing 19 girls and a male toddler, plunging the Caribbean Community (Caricom) nation into mourning and forcing authorities to review safety measures at similar facilities.
A major part of the reason for the deaths at the school near Brazil had much to do with the state of panic that ensued once the fire broke out, that the keys to main doors could not be found, and delays in summoning the ill-equipped fire service to the scene. Many of the windows to a one-story building were also heavily grilled, normally to prevent the high school students from escaping the dorms and heading into the community to socialize with much older miners, brandishing raw cash, gold, and diamond production from nearby mines.
Police, fire officers, and residents rescued 14 other students and had the unenviable task of removing the badly burned bodies of the 20 who perished as residents and parents wept uncontrollably.
At the weekend, a commission of inquiry that had been appointed by the government to probe the disaster and make recommendations about other interior dorms handed in its report to President Irfaan Ali. It laid bare a plethora of errors and missteps involving state officials.
Police have since charged a 15-year-old student with nearly two dozen counts of first degree murder. Investigators said she was angry about being denied a pass to leave the facility for a few hours.
“Based on the evidence, we concluded that an individual intentionally set the fire,” said the commission. “We found there was a delay in contacting and/or seeking the assistance of the fire station. Issues [included] crowd control and access to the dormitory compound encountered by the fire service on route to the fire, inadequacies of the fire service in rescue and firefighting equipment, and the lack of available water supply to fight the fire. These factors assisted with the speed of the conflagration,” Commission Chair and retired Army Chief of Staff Brig. Gen. Joseph Singh said. It was the worst single such incident in living memory.
Investigators also found that many of the windows had iron grills to secure the buildings from unwanted adult visitors. Panicked dorm officials were also unable to locate keys for five doors that had no grills in time to avoid fatalities, increasing the state of panic as the fire spread throughout the building. “This was accompanied with the human failure to access the keys in those chaotic and fiery circumstances,” the report stated.
Dormitory schools are constructed by the government to house students from far-flung interior communities while parents carry out daily chores, including hunting and farming. Police had explained that grills were put in place to prevent some of the teenaged girls from escaping at nights and weekends to socialize with miners who flash gold, diamonds, and raw cash while grooming the girls for favors, including sexual.
The commission contended that this culture has to change because these acts are committed “with the tacit support of family members who benefit financially from such arrangements.”
Ali echoed calls for a culture change among students and adults, noting that education and other authorities face “tremendous difficulties in the behavioral pattern and changes in many schools, and we now have to work and see how we incorporate a higher degree of discipline through a systemic intervention.”
